Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov on Tuesday accused the United States of attempting to disrupt the TurkStream gas pipeline to Europe with the aid of attacks by Ukrainian drones.
Lavrov said this in Moscow on Tuesday.
The U.S. was pushing its “Ukrainian clients’’ to put TurkStream out of action following what he saw it as sabotage of the Nord Stream pipelines under the Baltic Sea in September 2022.”
TurkStream runs from Russia’s Krasnodar region east of Crimea under the Black Sea to Kıyıköy to the west of Istanbul.
“I’m of the firm conviction that the U.S. cannot tolerate competition in any area at all,’’ Lavrov told a major news conference in Moscow to mark the start of the year.
His remarks followed a drone attack on the Russkaya compressor station in Krasnodar, some 320 kilometres from the frontline in Ukraine.
The Russian Defence Ministry reported that the drones had been shot down, but that the resulting fragments had caused damage to a building and to infrastructure.
The Kremlin described the attack as terrorism against its energy infrastructure.
Both Nord Stream gas pipelines from Russia to Germany were damaged by a series of unexplained explosions in September 2022, around seven months after the Russian full-scale invasion of Ukraine.
Referring to the damage to the pipelines, Lavrov accused German Chancellor Olaf Scholz of deliberately avoiding comment on the blasts, and not daring to make a sound.
Russia accused the U.S. of being behind the blasts, which it terms a terrorist attack.
Media reports have linked Ukrainian government agents to the sabotage.
Ukraine, along with Poland, had long opposed the pipelines, as had the U.S. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky has rejected allegations of Ukrainian involvement. (dpa/NAN)
